THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURGGielgud Theatre, London W1Opened 22 March, 2011***

There seems to be some expectation that
this will prove to be a “Marmite” show: people will either love it or
hate it. I’m afraid I fall unhelpfully between the two extremes.

There
is much here to like and to admire. Jacques Demy’s 1964 film is a
classic, not least for its audacity in having the entirety of its
dialogue sung to a score by Michel Legrand. It is not a musical; there
are few songs as such (although the main romantic number “I Will Wait
For You” is a thing of rare beauty); most of the vocal score is
recitative. Indeed, the slug-line for this stage version describes it
as “a French romance that just happens to be sung”. It adds a dreamlike
quality, at once unreal and hyperreal, to the tale of young Geneviève
and her love for motor mechanic Guy in this 1950s Norman port; when he
is drafted to the Algerian War, leaving her with child, her
umbrella-shopkeeper mother counsels her to make her life elsewhere.

Lez
Brotherston’s impressive designs further stress that this is not the
everyday world: a model townscape, a clutch of big neon signs, even for
no obvious reason a slide down which the lovers shoot. And the Kneehigh
company have a deserved reputation for telling out-of-the-ordinary
tales in an out-of-the-ordinary way; here, as well as the music and the
dance routines, several spoken segments of introduction and framing are
delivered by a new character, Maîtresse, played by “kamikaze cabaret”
diva Meow-Meow, who first reaches the stage by clambering over the
audience (beginning, on press night, with Jonathan Ross).

I
wondered at first whether it was due to some deficiency on my own part
that, despite all this potential wonder, I felt no real transports
myself, no love for the
piece. Director Emma Rice notes that she and Kneehigh have a great
taste for “wonder tales”, especially those that end on a note of tristesse as Guy and Geneviève’s story does. Here, for me at least, despite a simple but beautiful coup in the final moment, even in its native language the tristesse
refused to flow. I cannot identify the missing element at the heart of
this re-creation, but something is palpably absent. Hélas.